organized

One of my commenters asked a great question last week that gets to the heart of the balancing game we have to play when writing romance. The characters have to be perfect enough for each other to make a believable couple, but there also has to be enough conflict between them to sustain a story.

With a new year, we often want to start on the right foot. We don’t want to repeat last year’s mistakes. (Let’s make new ones instead, right? *smile*) So to get and stay organized, I’d love to find a time management approach that helped me track everything.

Happy New Year! To concentrate on good things for the new year, let’s talk about what things worked for us and what we want to continue in the new year. We need to recognize those successes to give ourselves credit, to ensure we don’t let our good habits fade by the wayside, and so we know how to push our successes through into the new year.

I want us all to have an even better year in 2015, so we might need to work on our weaknesses or identify what didn’t work for us this past year. What decisions, processes, or priorities held us back? The better we understand ourselves, the more likely we are to know how to succeed in the future.

If you’re celebrating this week, I hope your plans all unfold smoothly, your travels all go safely, your family members all behave perfectly, and all your dreams for the New Year come true. Before I go offline for the holiday, I wanted to leave you with some fun (and yummy) gifts.

Whether we won NaNoWriMo or not, we survived November, and I want to take a moment to gasp—er, breathe. After everything that went wrong with my month, winning feels like a miracle. So let’s talk about how we can move forward from any draft, NaNo or not.

Many of us need help knowing what gifts to buy for people, so with that in mind, I’m sharing my Ultimate Gift Guide for Writers. If you’re a writer, this might help you give suggestions to family or friends. Or you can direct your family to this post for ideas. Something on this list is bound to please every writer out there.

We often write about settings or jobs or situations we haven’t experienced, and diversity among our characters should be no different. Today’s guest post is about how we can research and learn more about experiences for which we don’t have first-hand knowledge and avoid the fear of “getting it wrong.”

No matter what genre we write, we’re likely to have to research something. If our stories take place within the real world, we might have to research events, settings, or diseases. If our stories take place outside the real world, we might have to research theories, ideas, or concepts. In other words, today’s post about how to research for writing projects will be relevant to most of us.

We often choose which story to focus on by writing the idea that pesters us the most. That “squeaky wheel” path might lead us to hop genres without meaning to, and our brand is often tied to our genre. So should we ignore that idea? Learn some of the pros and cons we should keep in mind if we consider following our muse’s lead.